Internet Security Plummeted in 2015, Reports Symantec

Online crooks are seen imbibing corporate-best-practices, implying their ever-increasing e-threats are affecting both consumers and businesses, cautions Symantec. In 2015, there were 9 'mega-breaches.' Given that, Symantec's latest year-in-review report computes over one-half billion records consisting of financial and personal information as stolen the same year.

Professional attackers lay hands on 0-day security flaws, either utilizing them to serve own purposes else making a sale deal of them with crooks of lower levels and fast commoditizing them. Last year (2015) there was a more than twice the total count of 0-day flaws making a fresh record of 54, growing 125 percent since 2014. Besides, new malware samples found numbered 430m.

Since 0-days get exploited explosively, it only shows hackers' growing skills with them. Symantec reports that considering these flaws' worth, it isn't astonishing that a marketable sale now exists for satisfying demand. These vulnerabilities assisted PC-hackers to steal huge volumes of personal information.

The total estimated hacked identities during 2015 hiked to 429m, accounting for a 23% rise since 2014, says Symantec. This estimated figure occurred largely due to a remarkable aggregate of 9 major hacks, meaning a hack of more than 10m consumers' confidential data. Thehill.com posted this, April 12, 2016.

There was also an uprising of several experimented-and-real frauds in 2015. Cyber-crooks made a repeat visit to bogus technical support frauds that recorded a 200% rise in 2015. In these frauds, United Kingdom was the second greatest attacked country worldwide. Only now, fraudsters dispatch bogus security alerts to smart-phones etc., drawing end-users towards call centers, which attackers run, so they can be tricked into purchasing worthless services.

According to Director Kevin Haley of Symantec Security Response, sophisticated cyber-criminal gangs of today echo government-sponsored attackers' dexterity sets. They've vast resources along with an immensely-dexterous technical staff which works so efficiently that it works only business hours while maintains holidays and weekends as non-working. Moreover, lower-level crooks are setting up call centers for increasing their scams' effect.

Interestingly, in 2015, an extremely common threat was tech support frauds, with Symantec identifying as well as preventing more than 100m such assaults.

» SPAMfighter News - 4/19/2016